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The history of the modern U.S. Capitol, the iconic seat of American
government, is also the history of America's most tumultuous years.
As the majestic new building rose above Washington's skyline,
battles over slavery and secession ripped the country apart. Ground
was broken just months after Congress adopted the Compromise of
1850. Workers began to bolt the Capitol's nine-million-pound
cast-iron dome into place in 1856. The Statue of Freedom was placed
atop it in 1863, five months after the Battle of Gettysburg. Little
known is the greater irony: America owes the building's scale and
magnificence to Jefferson Davis, who remained the Capitol's
staunchest advocate up until the week he left Washington to become
president of the Confederacy. Davis' protege and the engineer in
charge was army captain Montgomery Meigs, who as Lincoln's
quartermaster general of the Union Army would never forgive Davis'
betrayal of the nation. The Capitol's brilliant architect, and
Meigs' longtime rival, was Thomas U. Walter, a Southern sympathizer
who would turn fiercely against the South and all who had betrayed
the Union.
Developed specifically for the Vietnam War (and made famous by the
2004 presidential campaign), Swift Boats were versatile craft "big
enough to outrun anything they couldn't outfight" but too small to
handle even a moderate ocean chop, too loud to sneak up on anyone,
and too flimsy to withstand the mildest of rocket attacks. This
made more difficult an already tough mission: navigating coastal
waters for ships and sampans smuggling contraband to the Viet Cong,
disrupting enemy supply lines on the rivers and canals of the
Mekong Delta, and inserting SEALs behind enemy lines. The stories
in this book cover the Swift Boats' early years, which saw
search-and-inspect operations in Vietnam's coastal waters, and
their later years, when the Swift Boats' mission shifted to the
Mekong Delta's labyrinth of 3,000 miles of rivers, streams, and
canals. This is an intimate, exciting oral history of Swift Boats
at war in Vietnam.
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